Edaville Railroad Festival Of Lights 2023

 

A gang of us went to Edaville Railroad in Carver this year. 

Edaville Railroad is named for the original owner, Edward D. Atwood. There is no official Edaville section of South Carver.

The park was first opened in 1947. It was originally a working railroad, used to harvest cranberries (Carver's motto? "Cranberries? Just happen to have some right here") on the bog that is now the park. 

A quick pause in the history lesson so one of our journalists can pose with Santa.

They used to let neighbors ride for free, but demand increased, so he began charging a nickel a ride.

The trains were purchased from various failing railroads, as far away as Santa Fe.

The original tracks were laid on top of the levees surrounding the cranberry bogs.

Atwood perished in an explosion, and the park (the train rides became popular enough that the cranberry farm gradually became a theme park) was bought by a Rhode Island seafood magnate/railroad enthusiast. His claim to fame was that he sold the clams used to make Campbell's Clam Chowder.

The seafood guy, a Nelson Blount, owned the park, while the Atwood family owned the land. That never ends well...

Blount died in a plane crash (Edaville owners have a Spinal Tap drummer tendency to die spectacularly) and the park ended up in the hands of a former park worker in 1970. The park went into a slow decline at this point, but the holiday celebrations kept it in the black.

Edaville shut down in the 1990s for a while, and a series of new owners bought the park and the land, ending the territorial squabbles.

The park ended up in the hands of Delli Priscoli. Priscoli actually had the park sold, but found out that the new owner was going to raze the park, so he backed out. A relatively unknown figure, Priscoli is nonetheless a Plymouth County superhero.

Priscoli then began to rebuild the park, adding carnival rides to lure in more people and keep the park hoppin' even during non-Christmas times.

If you need a laugh, it was during this period that Stephen and Jessica, mistakenly believing the park to be closed for good, walked right in during the off-season and wrote a winsome, nostalgiac article about old Edaville.

While that is cute and all, it is also trespassing/breaking and entering, and our boss at Cape Cod TODAY got a very angry phone call from a Carver detective looking for a fictional "Stacey" and "Ted from Hyannis Port". These names were our nom de guerre for the Cape newspaper while we were banking concurrent paychecks from AOL and CCT.

Priscoli agreed to not press charges in exchange for us being his Cape Cod publicists, and our newspaper soon became flush with us promoting whatever Edaville was up to. The alternative was me being in jail with some Hell's Angel for a cellmate.

'I murdered a rival gang member, what are you in here for?" ...

(nervous pause) ...

"I broke into Edaville Railroad"

It all ended well, however. We're doing this article for free, and we paid to get in.

Edaville now is based around the train ride, although most of the park is akin to a small town carnival. 75% of our tme there was spent on carnival attractions rather than the train ride.

God appreciates a good light show, and tagged in with a spectacular sunset.

Please note that buying a ticket to the park doesn't get you on the train. you need to upgrade for that.

Aside from breaking in during 2012, I hadn't been to Edaville since the mid 1970s or so. Even my older sister can't recall when we went, although we both know that we went.

We went to the well a few times with this sunset.

Priscoli put the park up for sale after the disastrous Covid shutdowns, and the new owner- Shervin B. Hawley- assures us that the park is now in good hands. The new owner is notable for 1) being the first time I have head "Shervin" as a name, and 2) he has a Hawley Jolly Christmas every year.

When I was teaching science one year (I was wholly unqualified, and was in that class because the former teacher quit after one of the kids hit her in the face with a football), I learned that giraffes are generally homosexual. No gay hatred here, just an odd thing to discover, and I don't recall Mutual of Omaha's Wild Kingdom ever mentioning it. Giraffes, which have few natural predators (a giraffe's back kick is strong enough to punch a hole through a lion) and can forage for food at heights greater than other terrestrial heavyweights, should rule Africa. but up to 75% of their sexual activity is same-sex, and they just don't produce enough offspring to run the Dark Continent. 

Edaville is open most of the year, and you can ride the trains through the bogs adjacent to the property. They also run the carnival rides all summer, and even have Thomas The Tank Engine hanging around. 

The neighbors pitch in to steer tourists down the right side street to get to the park. You'd think a well-known railroad park on a cranberry bog would stand out in a town of 11,000 people, but pretty much all of Carver is a cranberry bog.

The Festival Of lights runs through New Year's Eve.

Edaville is one of those things from your childhood which may not be around for all of your adulthood, so I'd recommend moving sooner rather than later. That said, they seem to do a bustling business during the holiday season.

You may get eaten by a Velociraptor, but that's a small price to pay for a step back in time to the railroad era. 

Sometimes I level the camera, sometimes I don't level the camera.

Rides are fun for both a 50 pound child and a 250 pound journalist.

Eat before you go there. At the risk of doing that David Brooks thing with the $78 burger and triple whiskey, this snack cost me $17. That cup is full of Cocoa, not Courvoisier.